I listen to a podcast called This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte and few other tech writers and hosts of their own shows (if you don’t listen to TWiT and you’re interested in tech, I’d definitely recommend it). There are 2 things I specifically want to mention about 2 of the recent shows that I listened to.

Towards the end of TWiT 197 “Steal this diploma”, the panel had a discussion about the changing nature of higher education (clicking the link will open the transcript for the show…search for “how pedagogy is changing”). I think if you’re reading this blog then you might find that to be an interesting conversation.

The second thing I wanted to mention is that I’ve been following the tweets from the Personal Democracy Forum conference (#pdf09) after listening to TWiT 199 “I’m a dinner jacket” earlier today. I’m not exactly new to Twitter (although I don’t post as often as some, or follow people who talk about their breakfast) but there was something that I didn’t exactly get until today. I’ve used Tweetdeck to create a search for “education” and “technology” but haven’t been very impressed with the results. Now I realise that it’s only searching for phrases that contain those key words. We also used Twitter to follow each other on the Mozilla Open Education course I participated in a few months ago, but still I didn’t get it. It was only today that I realised that I can use it to follow events in real time, kind of eavesdropping on a conversation between everyone who’s actually there. I’m realising more and more how incredibly powerful Twitter is, not as a tool, but as a communications platform. You can also read this article in Time magazine about how Twitter is changing the way we communicate.